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How To Tell If It’s Time To Ditch Your Drinking Friends

There comes a time in (almost) everyone’s life where they no longer have the willpower or endurance to black out three nights a week.

It’s a bittersweet time, but usually for the best since after college most people will call you an alcoholic for drinking that much every night.

For the most part, after you retire from your heavy-drinking days everything seems to get better. There are no crazy hangovers, you don’t wake up with randos, and you actually make it to work on time. The only thing that gets a little tricky? Figuring out if your drinking friends were just meant to be drinking friends.

Chances are, in your early college days, you made the mistake of turning a nighttime friend into a daytime friend. This happens to the best of us, because you’re just trying to make new friends and it’s a lot easier to do so when you’re drunk on jungle juice in a frat bathroom.

Unfortunately, some of us make these same mistakes when we’re post-grad. Maybe we moved to a new city where we don’t know anyone, or all our old friends moved away, but sometimes we’re just a lil desperate for friends and we’re willing to go to brunch with someone we’ve only met while tipsy.

There’s no shame in it, and it’s better to try to make friends instead of sitting home alone with Netflix every night. But just like a drunken hook-up, drunk friends can look a lot scarier in the daylight. Depending on how psycho they are sober, you can either keep them around for desperate times without getting too close or just ghost completely (as long as you’re sure you’ll never have to see them again).

Sometimes, even your not-totally-just-drinking-friends from college can kind of turn into drinking friends post-grad. You thought you were going to be bridesmaids at each other’s wedding, but then you realized that your only bonding experiences involved getting drunk, waking up hungover and rehashing last night’s stories, or planning drink-centric endeavors together.

Once you take heavy-drinking out of the equation, the friendship seems to fall flat. Perhaps your friendship just seems less lively when you both only have work drama and failed Tinder dates to talk about. Or, in an even worse scenario, perhaps your college friend isn’t ready to grow out of that phase, and she resents you for getting a “real job” while she continues to block her schedule for $2 Tuesdays at McFaddens.

If the latter is your situation, end things now before it gets too ugly. That is unless you want it to end in a semi-drunk phone call where she calls you out for being boring and old and you call her out for living off her parents’ money with no real ambitions.

In the former situation, you’ll probably end up on one of those fun carousels where you make plans, break plans, and say shit like, “Why haven’t I seen you in five months?”

Enjoy it, it’ll make great practice for the 10 other people you’ll endure this with.

It’s a mystery why nobody can ever fess up and say “maybe we’re not friends anymore.” Probably because one of you has a really cool job and the other is hoping to capitalize on it someday or whatever? Who knows.

Whatever your situation, you shouldn’t feel bad about slowly fading away from your drinking friends. Chances are, they feel the same way about the friendship and are happy you’re not clinging on.

Graduating from college – or graduating from the semi-alcoholic stage of your life – is a growing period. That comes with pain, but not the pain of accidentally hooking up with an ugly turd while plastered. Instead, it’s the pain of fading away from people you thought were gonna be your BFFL .

But if you look at a friend breakup the way you look at a relationship ending, you’ll realize that it’s hard to find someone who wants to stick around forever. Some people are only meant to be in your life for a finite period of time, and meant to be replaced by someone even better.

You grow, girl.

About The Author: Ashley Uzer

Ashley Uzer is an East Coast girl who dreams of fried chicken and an endless supply of stilettos. Follow Ashley on Instagram and Twitter.

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